Do We Have A Moral Obligation . . .

. . . to protect our guests from being gang raped?

This is not merely a rhetorical question.

As I detailed in a recent entry, I've been having a couple of ducks visit my yard again after a break of a year or two.

Let's call them Matilda and Herschel.

Well, the day after I posted that entry, Matilda was in the yard again, enjoying the early evening breeze and minding her own business:




Suddenly, two rogue males swooped in from the southwest and proceeded to chase her around my raised garden beds and into my neighbor's yard where they had their way with her:






Herschel soon showed up but seemed utterly perplexed by what was going on. He certainly did nothing to intervene.




Just 6 minutes after I'd taken that first shot of Matilda it was all over and everyone was going their separate ways.




It all happened so fast that I didn't know what to do except collect photographic evidence of these quite uncalled for goings-on.

I thought about intervening but I didn't want to risk startling Matilda and Herschel and possibly causing them to fly wildly into a fence or tree in their panic to escape.

I also thought about calling the cops, but I really wasn't in the mood to be laughed at.

Plus I felt that it would reveal something terrible about me if I called the cops on rogue male ducks when I spent 8 years not calling the cops on a certain recent rogue male president.

I've thought about calling the Ohio Department of Wildlife and asking them if what I saw is considered proper and acceptable dating behavior among ducks but the very idea of uttering the words into the phone that I would need to makes me feel nasty and unclean.

And given all the recent state budget cuts, I have to wonder if there is anyone left in the Ohio Department of Wildlife who even knows what a duck is anymore.

The bottom line is that I now find myself in a situation that Disney's True-Life Adventures did absolutely *nothing* to prepare me for.

I shall never ever look at Donald and Daffy in quite the same way again....


Of course the behavior I witnessed wasn't entirely unprecedented.

Several years ago something similar unfolded right outside my kitchen window, but... I guess I shrugged it off as being nothing more than a bizarre, one-time occurrence that may have been prompted by the over-consumption of fermented berries or some such thing.

This recent attack has been far more troubling.

Maybe this is what happens when one doesn't act immediately to nip things in the bud?

Or am I quite inappropriately imposing human standards of behavior on wild animals?

A brief Google search reveals that gang rape among mallards is far more common than I ever would have imagined.

What else might be going on out there without my knowledge??

Might deer as innocent-looking as Bambi be engaging in prostitution?

Might birds as endearing as Woody Woodpecker actually be paying chipmunks like Alvin and Theodore to eat the eggs of their rivals?

Am I going to go to my window someday soon and overhear the female squirrels gossiping about each other as viciously as the women on ABC's "The Bachelor"?

Maybe earmuffs aren't just for winter and political conventions anymore....

*Sigh*